Output details

Chamber Symphony, for 16 players (two movements, duration 23 minutes). Commissioned and premiered by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Diego Masson; broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 (twice) and on Czech Radio; further performances at the Lincoln Center, New York and at the Royal Festival Hall (as part of Philharmonia Music of Today portrait concert); recorded for release on forthcoming NMC D192.

A key research objective of my chamber symphony was to explore the potential of juxtaposing live and recorded music. Refining a technique I first explored in my orchestral work Between Two Waves of the Sea, I pre-recorded sections of instrumental music, requiring them to be reproduced in performance via a domestic CD player (see pages 44, 51 and 105 of the published score) – a somewhat ‘low-fi’ sound source deliberately chosen to contrast with the live component. The recorded music is first heard towards the end of the first movement, gradually emerging from the canon (pp.42-50) of which it forms an extension. As the live component subsides, the audience continues to hear music but sees no movement onstage – a metaphor for internalisation, the passage of the music from reality into the listener’s imagination where it may continue, ad infinitum. The start of the second movement reverses this juxtaposition, with recorded music upstaged by the same passage played live at a faster tempo (see p.51).

The piece thus challenges traditional discourses on the relationship between live and recorded sound by inverting it: rather than affirm recorded sound as a document which faithfully reflects reality, this work presents it in the context of a ‘live’ performance specifically to underline its very artificiality. My programme note relates these concerns back to the work of William Blake and in particular, his attitude towards mechanisation and mass production. The music also contains several polyrhythmic ‘mechanisms’ (first movement, bars 17-22, 42-49, 53-64 and elsewhere) echoing Blake’s mill-wheels, which are heard to ‘creak’ through the use of unfamiliar instruments and extended instrumental techniques (see for example the cuica and double bass, bars 58-65).